We’re happy to announce a new feature of Solano CI: validated solano.yml configurations.

One of the most common support issues we see is configuration mistakes. YAML is a much friendlier format for configuration files than, say, XML, but it comes with its own set of gotchas. If your editor helpfully converts whitespace to tabs, that’s a parse error. Forget a space after a colon? That’s valid YAML, but it’s probably semantically completely different from what you intended.

From now on, Solano CI builds and CLI sessions will display YAML parse errors up-front and with helpful guidance on how to fix them. Further, the config parser will run a set of validation rules to ensure that the config keys you’ve set match what our system expects, and to catch many common errors and typos that we’ve seen.

Configuration validation is live now in Solano CI. We’ll be adapting both our presentation of parse failures and semantic errors over the next few weeks. If you see any confusing error messages, or you can’t figure out how to get your solano.yml to pass validation – or you have suggestions about this new feature – just drop us a note at support@solanolabs.com, or use the feedback forms built into the application.